San Jose: Small plane forced to land on expressway near Reid-Hillview Airport

A small plane made an emergency landing on Capitol Expressway at Quimby Road in San Jose on October 3, 2013. (Mark Gomez/San Jose Mercury News)

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A small plane is towed away from Capitol Expressway and Quimby Rd. after making an emergency landing in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2013. The plane landed north of the Reid-Hillview Airport. No injuries were reported. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group)

SAN JOSE -- A small private plane was forced to make an emergency landing on Capitol Expressway in the middle of the Thursday morning commute -- about a half mile from the local airport where it's housed -- but there were no reported injuries or damage, authorities said.

The green and white single-engine﻿ Bellanca Citabria touched down in the southbound lanes just before 8 a.m., coming to a stop in the right-turn lane onto Quimby Road near Eastridge Mall.

According to the owner of the flight-training school that operates the plane, during takeoff from Reid-Hillview Airport, a pilot instructor and trainee noticed that, for an unknown reason, the engine was not accelerating sufficiently to climb.

"It stopped developing enough power to climb so they looked to see where to put it down," said Zdravko Podolski, owner of AeroDynamic Aviation. "They turned around thinking they could make it back to the airport, but elected to put it down on a gap in the expressway."

Podolski said because the engine was idling at best, an attempt to return to the airport would have been riskier than descending immediately. He lauded the performance of his instructor, who he declined to name but described as a San Jose man in his 20s with an accomplished teaching pedigree and over 3,000 hours in the air.

Once it was clear that the aircraft was struggling, the instructor took over the controls, and it was on the ground three minutes after it took off.

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"It was an excellent performance," he said. "He notified the tower, avoided obstacles and when it was safe to do so, he set it down on the ground in a big empty space. There wasn't even a scratch. That's primarily the reason for lots of training."

Among those obstacles were overhead power lines. Podolski said his mechanics are examining the plane to determine the source of the trouble, which was likely mechanical.

"We'll figure out what it was and sort it out," he said.

Cesar Molina of San Jose was pumping gas at the Arco station at the intersection of Capitol and Quimby when he saw the small plane land.

"It's a scary thing when you see a plane land near a gas station," he said.

He said his first thought was that the plane might explode, but the aircraft safely came to a stop. San Jose police Sgt. Heather Randol said traffic on the southbound lanes of Capitol are typically -- and Thursday morning, fortuitously -- lighter than the northbound lanes.

Randol said no one was injured and that the occupants cooperated with investigators. Fire crews were initially summoned but were quickly called off, Fire Capt. Cleo Doss said.

The plane was towed around 9 a.m. According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the aircraft is registered to Amelia Reid Aviation LLC, a training school based at Reid-Hillview Airport that now operates under the name AeroDynamic Aviation. Amelia Reid was a renowned aviator and her family is one of the namesakes of the airport.

Police said the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board were alerted to the landing, but any investigation will likely be delayed to the federal government shutdown. A message sent to a spokesman for the western region of the FAA elicited an automated response that he's "not in the office due to a lapse in federal funding." An FAA spokeswoman in Washington later confirmed the basic details of the emergency landing.

Since the airport opened nearly 80 years ago, there have been intermittent incidents where planes have landed off the runway, including a similar instance on Capitol Expressway in 2007. The adjacent Eastridge Mall has seen a smattering of short landings: since it opened in 1971, there have been at least six instances of planes touching down either in the parking lot or on top of the actual structure.